~ The blog of author Matthew Farrer

Skate Fatale and the gnashing of teeth

We were at the AIS Arena earlier tonight to cheer on the Vice City Rollers, the ACT’s all-star Roller Derby team, against their Victorian counterparts. It’s a great venue, holding over three times the audience than the CRDL’s usual venue at Southern Cross Stadium and with a stage for the prematch/halftime entertainment (Annie and the Armadillos, who deftly worked Derby references into their tunes in honour of the occasion), an electronic scoreboard that showed team scores, jam number, the time left in the jam, who the current lead jammer was and all sorts. Oh, and food counters that were right there in the arena and not grievously understaffed.

Great venue. The match… was… kind of soul-crushing. I think that skater for skater there was probably a small skills gap between the Canberra and Melbourne teams, but not a fatal one, with the Canberra stars like Bambi von Smash’er and Short Stop able to make up for it. The trouble was, it wasn’t skater on skater, it was team on team, and as a team the VRDL had it their way right from the first jam. They worked together beautifully: their pack could close in on a Roller and box her in, letting them control where she was on the track, steering her around or bringing her to a literal standstill; they were brilliant at “waterfalling”, tag-teaming an opponent with successive blocks from their whole pack to send them right off the track, and they used a tactic I’ve not seen before which according to the commentators was called “trapping the goat”. A rule of Derby is that the pack skaters have to be in close formation, not strung out on the track, and if they get too far out of squad coherency (hi, 40K players!) they have to slow down and re-form. So what the other team does is box one of them in so the rest can’t continue around the track, and simply sit there, keeping the other team below strength and paralysed, while their jammer whips around the track racking up lap after lap’s worth of points.

That brings up an interesting development I saw tonight that I’ve never seen in any of the CRDL matches: the visitors played a far slower game than the locals. If their jammer was in the lead (which she almost always was, I swear a couple of them could fucking teleport) then they’d slow the whole pack down to almost walking pace, and once or twice just halting across the track with a hapless Roller trapped somewhere in between them. When the skaters are in motion they’re less stable and it’s easier for someone to block and shove their way through a pack because they’ve got some momentum to play with, but from a standstill? Wasn’t happening. It was a tactic that the Rollers didn’t seem to have any answer for: jams in the Canberra league run at speed and this was a whole different game. (I did notice that when the VRDL didn’t get lead jammer and put on the speed to try and deny the Rollers points, the game got much more even as the Rollers’ familiarity with a high-speed game came back into play.)

I don’t doubt that the CRDL skaters will have taken a lot of notes from tonight, since apart from anything else the first of the local teams to master the tactics that the VRDL used tonight will have an edge over the others when the local season kicks off in April. The Canberra league has some amazingly talented skaters and great fighting spirit – if they can focus that through the disciplined teamwork and tactical nous that the VRDL showed tonight then hopefully we can hand them back a defeat next time they cross the Vice City Rollers’ path.

“One of these days these skates are gonna roll right over you” sang the band tonight. Let’s roll.

Addendum: Looking back over that post it sounds kind of downbeat and nasty, and I’ll admit I wasn’t in the best mood coming out of AIS tonight. But I should add that my hands are sore and my throat moreso from cheering and applauding, for the visitors as well as the home team, and despite the one-sided scoreboard nearly every jam got roars of approval from the crowd and loud oohs at the blocks and tumbles. Wouldn’t have missed it. Roller Derby rules.

Addendum 2: Wow, look at you all. Hello to everyone who folled the link here from the CRDL page and Twitter, I’m flattered that my slightly brainfrazzled thoughts from Saturday night were worth passing around. I’ve now corrected the tagging for my earlier Derby bout reports so clicking the CRDL tag on this one should show you them, if that appeals to you. I see the dates for the 2011 CRDL season are up now, and I’ll get to and write up as many bouts as I can. Stay tuned.

Addendum 3: Aaaand this post has given this blog its official busiest day ever, outdoing Angron and the Battle of Mount Ainslie. Wow.

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10 thoughts on “Skate Fatale and the gnashing of teeth”

Awesome description. I think the VRDL All Stars are national champions for a reason, but like all games the tactics will eventually have counter-tactics. Still the Canberra Derby skaters will probably learn a lot more about blocking from this sort of game.

The closing few jams where the Vice City Rollers subbed some fresh blockers and pushed for speed certainly improved things from then

Heh, I looked back at my last Derby post after I made this and found that I had actually referred to the Surly Griffins (who I think are the most tactically savvy team in the CRDL) using just the sort of tactics I refer to here as being absent from the Canberra game. It obviously didn’t catch on enough in the last bout to make an impression – I seem to recall my main reaction to the goat-trap tactic was surprise at the coherency-distance rule, since it had seemed rather absent from the first couple of bouts I attended. (But it did finally help me realise what the Pivot’s job actually is!)

I agree with you that there will inevitably be a counter developed to the slow blocking strategy* but I have no idea what that will look like. It seemed to be very difficult to force the pack to speed up if one team were working to slow it down. If the other team just stops on you, what do you do, push them along like they were a stalled car? I’m glad I don’t have to think of an answer to that. I’ll be interested to see what happens when the four Canberra teams start trying this stuff on one another.

*Which I keep thinking of as the “Dwarf Game”, from my Blood Bowl days. (BB is a boardgame based on American football with teams of various fantasy creatures.) The basic Dwarf tactic was to form a solid block and stomp slowly up the middle of the field while the other team ricocheted haplessly off your wall of players, so you see why the term keeps coming to mind. I suppose Canberra was playing the Elf game, all speed and agility and dispersed formations, but I suspect I’m stretching the analogy a bit now so I’ll let it go 🙂

I noticed that you’ve made a few references to pack definition and likened it to squad coherency. This is a pretty good analogy — just like when you waste a movement phase reforming your squad after losing the bridging model(shame), leaving the pack and/or engagement zone can be fatal to a team’s tactic.

The pack is defined as the largest single group of skaters from both teams skating within 10′ of eachother. The 10′ markers on the track serve as a guide for skaters and onlookers to judge this distance. Both teams must maintain a pack.

A Blocker who skates >10′ fore or aft of the nearest pack skater is no longer considered to be part of the pack. This is okay for the most part, as they are still inside the Engagement Zone, and can therefore continue to engage the opposition. A Blocker who is more than 20′ from the nearest pack skater is considered to be Out of Play, as they have left the Engagement Zone, and cannot legally engage or otherwise impede the opposition. They must return to the Engagment Zone immediately.

This is where “trapping a goat” comes in. If you have 3 Blue skaters surrounding 1 Black skater, you can make the pack slow right down without actually ever destroying the pack (destroying the pack may get you a penalty). If you’ve got a slow pack, Blue jammer doesn’t work as hard to get points, Black Jammer has to get through a slow wall (which can be much more difficult than a fast wall), and you can effectively limit the playing field for the opposing blockers.

Thank you for the reply, this is all excellent stuff to learn. I knew about having to keep pace with the Pivot (are position titles capitalised in Derby?) but I didn’t know about the Engagement Zone rule and that makes a lot of sense out of some of the manoeuvres I saw on the track. I certainly saw the advantages in halting the pack when you’ve got a Jammer advantage when the Allstars were racking up over twenty points in a jam.

I’d imagine it also adds to the effectiveness of big blocks during a high-speed jam. Skaters have to re-enter the track more or less where they got knocked off it, correct? I’ve often seen skaters have to hook back around to cross the boundary back onto the track at the same point they got blocked off it. So if the pack is moving at speed then not only is a skater out of action while she’s off the track, but she’s barred from doing anything until she catches up with the pack again to boot. Am I on the right (heh) track here?

(This is why I always sit in the upper bleachers instead of down on the suicide line, it’s so I can see the whole game at once and geek out over the tactics.)

Pivots generally take on a sort of leadership role within the pack for their team (think Sergeants). Teams use them to make sure that their tactic is being executed on the track and is adapted as necessary. As far as the rules are concerned:

-They’re the only players on the team who are allowed to start on the Pivot line, and if they’re on that line then the rest of the pack has to start behind them.
-They are the only players who can receive a “star pass”. You would have seen this during the game when VCR passed their jammer helmet cover to the pivot.

Skaters who are blocked off the track have to re-enter without bettering their relative position in the pack, or they may receive a penalty for cutting. What this translates to is that if you force me off the track, I have to come back in the track behind you. This is obviously a big advantage for the blocker that forces another out. However, if you fall over or go out of play/bounds before I’ve come back in, then I no longer have to yield to you, as you’ve relinquished your advantage.

It’s pretty easy to see how this is tied in with controlling the pack speed (and therefore Engagement Zone). I know that quite a few skaters that night suffered penalties from me because the opposing team made superior use of pack control.

Hah, I haven’t seen any of the really dramatic whips they did in the films, but I have seen skaters boosting or pushing each other, or towing each other into position. Most of the assists I’ve seen have been about manoeuvre rather than brute acceleration, since the thing about the slower games is that a lot of the time if you whip one of your teammates up ahead all you do is send her bouncing off the back of the pack.